I'm actually fine with such views not being made illegal though - but I'm not fine with the premise that there should never be any social consequences at all for any ideology or viewpoint regardless of its nature or intent to do harm. Nor do I believe that the right to free speech means everyone must be forced to hear, seriously consider, host or publish that speech.
There are 300,000,000 million Americans each with his or her own free will and ability to determine right from wrong. So you're saying they are just sheep and do things blindly?
The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
No. Not only did I not say that, there's no reasonable way to infer that from my comment, and your doing so demonstrates an unwillingness on your part to argue in good faith.
That people are influenced by more than purely logical, didactic arguments should be self evident, nor does that fact make people sheep, it's simply human nature. We're not compilers, after all, we're primates with countless irrational biases hard wired into our brains. Anti-vaxxers, COVID-denialists, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists of all stripes, the resurgence of discredited white supremacist and anti-semitic ideology under the politically correct guise of "racial realism" and the phenomenon of fake news spread by social media should be enough to demonstrate that falsehood can be more compelling than fact, and that facts alone are not sufficient to dissuade such people from their false beliefs, or stop their influence.
>The real changes, the ones that lasted generations, the things that made America truly great, were done because free speech convinced people to change their minds.
No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest. America has only ever granted its inalienable rights to white Christian men by default - everyone else has had to fight tooth and nail for their seat at the table and for every scrap of human dignity they could take from the cornucopia of American liberty.
Women's suffrage was earned with speech and blood. African American rights were earned with speech and blood. LGBT rights were earned with speech and blood. Even recently, few outside of the black community really cared about systemic racist violence among the police, despite the black community speaking at length about it for years until they also started taking to the streets and burning shit down... then suddenly everyone else noticed and started listening.
Speech without the force of consequence is as useless as a toothless guard dog.
You argued:
A: Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white
supremacists take over
B: In a democracy a majority of the people have to agree
that white supremacy should be the dominant principle for
governmental rule.
> No they weren't. They were accomplished with speech and consequence, often long, violent, ugly protests and frequently civil unrest.
Rosa Parks didn't throw a brick through a window. She refused to sit in the back of the bus. That started a boycott of the bus system, and it worked without bloodshed.
Sure blood was spilled in the civil rights marches but not because the people marching wanted it to be.
I Rosa Parks was radical whole her life. She was not proponent of super peaceful activism, she at the moment thought fighting would he strategically bad idea.
Had she been meek lady, there would be no protests.
She did lived at violent place at the time, did dealt with lynchings, beatings and legal protests up to that point. She did not had philosophy of peaceful activism above all.
While she was not violent, she was not proponent of peaceful above all protesting. That was Kings philosophy and even he was up to breaking law.
It's quite straightforward to draw this conclusion from the following portion of your previous comment:
>Unfortunately, in your world, the racists and white supremacists take over
How does a community 'take over' without expanding to at least a dominant minority? And how does the point being argued, allowing them to speak freely, enable that unless we're to assume that simply being exposed to that worldview will grow their ranks?
And the world would be a worse place without those laws. Any real discussion about free speech starts with the premise that not all speech can be free and the real questions is in the details of what speech should be free.
The innocent explanation is more often right than the guilty one.
There was someone with a throwaway account that replied with the argument that "Free speech need not be absolute", and then started getting voted down.
What's truly ironic I feel is that in my world view, his speech would just sit there as an alternative viewpoint, read and disagreed with.
But in his world his viewpoint could made illegal (or in the HN world downvoted), based upon what might be perceived as the popular rhetoric of the day.